The owner of a small limited company asks a simple question: which qualified accountant can do my year-end accounts and company tax, and what will it cost? An answer engine, or a careful reader, needs the page to say who does the work, what they are qualified as, how that can be checked and what the service costs. We reviewed pages from eight Leeds and Manchester practices that appeared in search results for a closely related query.
Prices were easier to find than people. Four of the eight published a price for a limited company service. One named an accountant alongside a qualification, none showed a visible link to a professional body’s directory entry and none named its anti-money-laundering supervisor.
What we found on these eight practices’ pages
Five named a professional accountancy body as a credential of the practice, two of them only in a badge image. None named an anti-money-laundering supervisor. Five listed what a limited company service includes, four said what changes the price or costs extra, and three said whether fees include VAT. Six gave a Companies House number and six showed reviews, a rating, a review count or a link to a review platform. One page carried a date, a news post from 2025. Information not found on the pages we reviewed may appear elsewhere on the practice’s website, in its terms of business or in an engagement letter.
Download the eight-practice observation sheet (CSV) · Inspect all eight sources
Why the person and the checkable link matter
ICAEW puts it plainly: legally anyone can call themselves an ‘accountant’. What a reader can check is a named person’s membership. ICAEW Chartered Accountants use the letters ACA or FCA, and ICAEW acts against people and firms who use the description or its logo when not entitled to. A firm’s right to call itself ‘Chartered Accountants’ follows separate rules; under the current rules, for a company, 50% or more of the directors must be chartered accountants, among other conditions.
The bodies publish ways to check. ACCA lets anyone search for a member by name, and its firm directory notes that not every firm listed is regulated by ACCA. ICAEW points readers to its Find a chartered accountant service. AAT issues two licences, AAT Licensed Accountant and AAT Licensed Bookkeeper. A badge on a page is a claim; a link to the entry lets the reader, or an AI system, confirm it.
Anti-money-laundering supervision is a separate question. Under regulation 7 of the Money Laundering Regulations 2017, each professional body listed in Schedule 1, including AAT, ACCA, CIMA, CIOT, ICAEW and ICAS, is the supervisor for the accountants and tax advisers who are its members or are regulated by it, and HMRC supervises external accountants and tax advisers who are not supervised by one of those bodies. HM Treasury has said this supervision will move to the Financial Conduct Authority, with implementation taking several years, and published its consultation response on 18 June 2026. We found no statement of a supervisor on the pages we reviewed; that is a page observation, not a finding that any practice is unsupervised.
Three useful patterns to take from the review
1. Put a name and a qualification beside the service
One practice’s pricing page names its founder, with an accountancy designation, as the client’s accountant, on the same page as its limited company price. It was the only practice of the eight to connect a named person to a qualification.
Its structured data, the code written for search engines and other software, also links to a professional body firm directory result and to its Companies House record. The visible page does not show those links. Putting the directory link beside the name would let a reader check the qualification without searching.
We did not open the directory result or check any professional directory; we recorded what the page contains.
2. Price the service and say what moves the price
One practice’s fees page lists estimated starting prices for each type of company work, each shown with VAT added, and says that VAT is added unless it states otherwise. It sets out the assumptions behind the estimates, such as tidy bookkeeping and no open HMRC matters, and lists what the final fee depends on, including turnover, the number of transactions, the state of the books, payroll and VAT.
Another practice takes a monthly approach: a monthly starting price held for a year, add-ons priced separately and an answer on what changes the figure. Either way, the reader learns the basis of the price as well as the number.
Observed page structure, not an endorsement of any practice or a check of its prices.
3. Make the business behind the page identifiable
Six of the eight gave a Companies House number, usually in the footer. The clearest set the trading name, the limited company behind it, the registered office and the company number side by side.
The same approach works for credentials. Two practices showed a professional body only as a badge image, and two others linked body logos to the bodies’ home pages rather than to an entry. A sentence naming the body, the membership and the directory link turns a logo into a statement a reader can check.
A practical review of your own service page
Open your limited company service or pricing page and work through these questions. Use the worksheet to record the evidence, the person responsible and the next change. The tick boxes below are a temporary reading aid; they do not create a score or save your work.
- Name the accountant and give the designation in words as well as letters.
- Link to the entry in the professional body’s own directory, not only its home page.
- Say which body regulates or licenses the practice and who supervises it for anti-money laundering.
- Give a price or starting price, whether it is monthly, annual or one-off, and the VAT treatment.
- List the included work and the main factors or extras.
- Show a review date and who approved the facts.
Download the 10-question worksheet (CSV)
A content-review aid, not a regulatory checklist or professional advice. Check your own body’s rules on descriptions and disclosures, and have a responsible principal approve the facts before publication.
How this relates to AI visibility
An AI assistant answering “which qualified accountant” can only repeat what it can find and connect. A named person, a qualification and a directory link give it something specific to cite; a badge image and a general claim give it less. These checks identify information a reader can verify; they do not show whether a page is cited in AI answers. Our page on AI visibility for accountants explains how we test the answers, and our measurement guide explains how to keep that evidence separate from a page review.
The practices we reviewed
We do not name the practices. Several observations concern information that is absent from the pages we reviewed, and a page review is not a fair basis for public judgements about individual businesses. Practices are labelled A to D (Leeds) and E to H (Manchester); letters were assigned at random within each city and do not follow search order. The page addresses, capture times and SHA-256 hashes are held on file. A practice in the sample can ask us for its own coding.
“Not found in reviewed pages” means we did not find that information on the one or two pages reviewed for that practice; it may appear elsewhere on its website or be provided during an enquiry. A recorded feature does not establish accuracy or completeness.
| Practice | Limited company price | Named qualified accountant | Professional body named | AML supervisor named |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Practice A Leeds | Found | Not found in reviewed pages | Not found in reviewed pages | Not found in reviewed pages |
| Practice B Leeds | Found | Not found in reviewed pages | Found (in text) | Not found in reviewed pages |
| Practice C Leeds | Not found in reviewed pages | Not found in reviewed pages | Found (badge only) | Not found in reviewed pages |
| Practice D Leeds | Found | Not found in reviewed pages | Found (in text) | Not found in reviewed pages |
| Practice E Manchester | Not found in reviewed pages | Not found in reviewed pages | Not found in reviewed pages | Not found in reviewed pages |
| Practice F Manchester | Not found in reviewed pages | Not found in reviewed pages | Not found in reviewed pages | Not found in reviewed pages |
| Practice G Manchester | Found | Found | Found (in text) | Not found in reviewed pages |
| Practice H Manchester | Not found in reviewed pages | Not found in reviewed pages | Found (badge only) | Not found in reviewed pages |
Download all twelve recorded features for each practice (CSV)
Method, boundaries and corrections
On 27 September 2026 we ran one web search per city for accountants offering fixed fees to limited companies, one for Leeds and one for Manchester. In result order, we took the first four distinct accountancy practices in each, excluding directories, marketplaces, quote-comparison sites and articles, and counting each practice once. Leeds was processed first. Four Leeds results were passed over and the next result taken: two returned a bot-check page with no readable text, one returned HTTP 429 twice and one was a quote-comparison site. The searches were run with the web search tool of the AI assistant used for this research, not directly on a named search engine. Asking for fixed fees favours practices that publish prices, so the price count is likely to be higher than for accountancy pages generally. The sample is purposive, not random, and search order favours practices that are already easy to find.
For each practice we reviewed the page the search returned and, where that page linked to one, its limited company pricing page. One pricing link redirected to the practice’s home page, which we reviewed instead. We captured the returned HTML with UTC timestamps and SHA-256 hashes and extracted the text and link list. We did not run JavaScript, so content that loads only in the browser, and anything shown only inside images, was not reviewed; image descriptions (alt text) were read. We coded visible text, links and image descriptions, not structured data or dates held only in page code; the one directory link we found in structured data is described above. We did not contact practices, request quotes, check professional directories or Companies House, or visit other pages.
Each practice was coded on twelve features using a written codebook. A professional body counts where it is named as a credential of the practice or a named person, in text or in an image description; a general five-star claim or row of stars without reviews, a stated rating, a count or a platform link does not count as reviews. Research and coding were assisted by AI; every headline code was checked against the retained captures before publication. Presence of a feature does not establish its accuracy or completeness.
The regulatory statements above are taken from the linked ICAEW, ACCA, AAT, HMRC, HM Treasury and legislation.gov.uk pages as read on 27 September 2026. This narrow page review does not determine whether any practice meets its professional body’s rules or any legal requirement.
Send specific corrections, with the page address and passage, to hello@answari.co.uk. Later corrections will be dated here.